Karl Marx (Author of The Communist Manifesto) Philosophy , Politics , Economics Influences Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach, Baruch Spinoza, Pierr Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach, Baruch Spinoza, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Max Stirner, Adam Smith, Voltaire, David Ricardo, Giambattista Vico, Maximilien Robespierre, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Claude Adrien Helvétius , Baron d'Holbach , Justus von Liebig , Charles Darwin, Charles Fourier, Robert Owen, Moses Hess , François Guizot , Constantin Pecqueur , Aristotle, and Epicurus. ...more edit data In 1818, Karl Marx, descended from a long line of rabbis, was born in Prussian Rhineland. Marx's' father converted to Protestantism shortly before Karl's birth. Educated at the Universities of Bonn, Jena, and Berlin, Marx founded the Socialist newspaper Vorwarts in 1844 in Paris.

After being expelled from France at the urging of the Prussian government, which "banished" Marx in absentia, Marx studied economics in Brussels. He and Engels founded the Communist League in 1847 and published the Communist Manifesto. After the failed revolution of 1848 in Germany, in which Marx participated, he eventually wound up in London. Marx worked as foreign correspondent for several U.S. publications. His Das Kapital came out in three volumes (1867, 1885 a In 1818, Karl Marx, descended from a long line of rabbis, was born in Prussian Rhineland. Marx's' father converted to Protestantism shortly before Karl's birth. Educated at the Universities of Bonn, Jena, and Berlin, Marx founded the Socialist newspaper Vorwarts in 1844 in Paris. After being expelled from France at the urging of the Prussian government, which "banished" Marx in absentia, Marx studied economics in Brussels. He and Engels founded the Communist League in 1847 and published the Communist Manifesto.

After the failed revolution of 1848 in Germany, in which Marx participated, he eventually wound up in London. Marx worked as foreign correspondent for several U.S. publications. His Das Kapital came out in three volumes (1867, 1885 and 1894). Marx organized the International and helped found the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Although Marx was not religious, Bertrand Russell later remarked, "His belief that there is a cosmic force called Dialectical Materialism which governs human history independently of human volitions, is mere mythology" (Portraits from Memory, 1956). Marx once quipped, "All I know is that I am not a Marxist" (according to Engels in a letter to C. Schmidt; see Who's Who in Hell by Warren Allen Smith). D. 1883. Marx began co-operating with Bruno Bauer on editing Hegel 's Philosophy of Religion in 1840. Marx was also engaged in writing his doctoral thesis, The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, which he completed in 1841.

It was described as "a daring and original piece of work in which Marx set out to show that theology must yield to the superior wisdom of philosophy": the essay was controversial, particularly among the conservative professors at the University of Berlin. Marx decided, instead, to submit his thesis to the more liberal University of Jena, whose faculty awarded him his PhD in April 1841. As Marx and Bauer were both atheists, in March 1841 they began plans for a journal entitled Archiv des Atheismus (Atheistic Archives), but it never came to fruition. Marx has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history. Marx is typically cited, with Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, as one of the three principal architects of modern social science. Marx publishes Manifesto - Feb 21, 1848 - HISTORY.com Marx publishes Manifesto Publisher A+E Networks On February 21, 1848, The Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx with the assistance of Friedrich Engels, is published in London by a group of German-born revolutionary socialists known as the Communist League.

The political pamphlet–arguably the most influential in history–proclaimed that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” and that the inevitable victory of the proletariat, or working class, would put an end to class society forever. Originally published in German as Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (“Manifesto of the Communist Party”), the work had little immediate impact. Its ideas, however, reverberated with increasing force into the 20th century, and by 1950 nearly half the world’s population lived under Marxist governments. Karl Marx was born in Trier, Prussia, in 1818–the son of a Jewish lawyer who converted to Lutheranism. He studied law and philosophy at the universities of Berlin and Jena and initially was a follower of G.W.F. Hegel, the 19th-century German philosopher who sought a dialectical and all-embracing system of philosophy. In 1842, Marx became editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, a liberal democratic newspaper in Cologne. The newspaper grew considerably under his guidance, but in 1843 the Prussian authorities shut it down for being too outspoken.

That year, Marx moved to Paris to co-edit a new political review. Paris was at the time a center for socialist thought, and Marx adopted the more extreme form of socialism known as communism, which called for a revolution by the working class that would tear down the capitalist world. In Paris, Marx befriended Friedrich Engels, a fellow Prussian who shared his views and was to become a lifelong collaborator. In 1845, Marx was expelled from France and settled in Brussels, where he renounced his Prussian nationality and was joined by Engels. During the next two years, Marx and Engels developed their philosophy of communism and became the intellectual leaders of the working-class movement. In 1847, the League of the Just, a secret society made up of revolutionary German workers living in London, asked Marx to join their organization. Marx obliged and with Engels renamed the group the Communist League and planned to unite it with other German worker committees across Europe. The pair were commissioned to draw up a manifesto summarizing the doctrines of the League. Back in Brussels, Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto in January 1848, using as a model a tract Engels wrote for the League in 1847.

In early February, Marx sent the work to London, and the League immediately adopted it as their manifesto. Many of the ideas in The Communist Manifesto were not new, but Marx had achieved a powerful synthesis of disparate ideas through his materialistic conception of history. The Manifesto opens with the dramatic words, “A spectre is haunting Europe–the spectre of communism,” and ends by declaring: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of the world, unite!” In The Communist Manifesto, Marx predicted imminent revolution in Europe. The pamphlet had hardly cooled after coming off the presses in London when revolution broke out in France on February 22 over the banning of political meetings held by socialists and other opposition groups. Isolated riots led to popular revolt, and on February 24 King Louis-Philippe was forced to abdicate. The revolution spread like brushfire across continental Europe. Marx was in Paris on the invitation of the provincial government when the Belgian government, fearful that the revolutionary tide would soon engulf Belgium, banished him. Later that year, he went to the Rhineland, where he agitated for armed revolt.

The bourgeoisie of Europe soon crushed the Revolution of 1848, and Marx would have to wait longer for his revolution. He went to London to live and continued to write with Engels as they further organized the international communist movement. In 1864, Marx helped found the International Workingmen’s Association–known as the First International–and in 1867 published the first volume of his monumental Das Kapital–the foundation work of communist theory. By his death in 1884, communism had become a movement to be reckoned with in Europe. Twenty-three years later, in 1917, Vladimir Lenin, a Marxist, led the world’s first successful communist revolution in Russia. Related Videos The Editors: The Communist Manifesto - 1848-1948 (January 1948) Transcription & mark-up: Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL. One hundred years ago two young Germans, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels shocked the minds of their contemporaries by presenting in a small political pamphlet, entitled the Communist Manifesto, the most audacious, liberating and epoch-making system of ideas since the dawn of mankind.

The amazing thing is not that the passage of time should have invalidated this or that detail of a theory which the authors themselves later elaborated and rendered more precise in subsequent years. The amazing thing is that this system of ideas has withstood so well the test of 100 years. Both in the days of Marx and Engels and in the decades since their deaths there has been no lack of sociological, economic and political doctrines. Without exception all these were aimed directly or covertly against the fundamental ideas first enunciated in the Manifesto. Which of these countless rival doctrines and “refutations” of Marxism have withstood the test of events and survive today? The situation remains much the same if we consider the fate of theories enunciated a century ago in the field of natural science. Which of them – whether in biology or chemistry or physics, and so on – has not been either drastically revised or superseded today? The case of the Manifesto is unique. This is so because the ideas of Marx and Engels constitute the only rational body of ideas explaining the evolution of human society. No one else has provided the keys to social action and progress as they did.

They proved, once and for all, that social forms are necessary but transitory and self-destroying products of historical development, a development that operates behind men’s backs and independent of their will. There is nothing eternally enduring about these man-made social forms. But there is a lawfulness in their rise, development and inescapable decline. Among the most important of these social laws is this, that the very foundation on which each of these social forms arises and develops constitutes at the same time and at a subsequent stage the main cause for its own downfall. It was the institution of slavery that devoured the ancient empires, just as it was the institution of serfdom that destroyed the feudal states which followed slavery. Out of these outlived orders and social relations has evolved capitalism – the most irrational and self-destructive of all class systems. Marx and Engels warned that it was impossible for society to progress further unless capitalism were replaced by a rational system of social relations, which could only be socialism. A Timely Warning What makes the Manifesto read today like the timeliest of timely documents is the Marxist forecast of the insoluble crisis into which capitalism is bound to plunge all mankind.

On the eve of World War II Leon Trotsky warned that the crisis of capitalism was threatening to rapidly turn into the crisis of human culture as a whole. With the advent of atomic explosives and the frenzied preparations for World War III this terrible threat has become the reality. On the one hundredth anniversary of the Communist Manifesto the world is confronted with the choice between physical annihilation and the socialist alternative. As Engels himself pointed out, the Communist Manifesto contains no reference to either the United States or Russia, the two main antagonists in the world arena today. This omission reflected the international situation of a century ago. In 1848 the proletarian movement was confined primarily to Western Europe. The colonial world still stagnated under the age-old yokes of backwardness and oppression. It was not until the beginning of this century that the colonial masses entered the arena of world history. As for Russia, she had scarcely started her capitalist development by 1848. Russian economy remained overwhelmingly agricultural, serfdom was still firmly entrenched.

Czarism reigned unchallenged and Russia was then, as it was to remain till the end of the Nineteenth Century, not merely one of the most backward countries in Europe, but one of the chief pillars of reaction there and throughout the world. The principal problem in 1848 was not how to promote revolutionary developments within Russia, but how to intervene in political life outside of Czarist Russia in order to deal blows to the Russian autocracy and its agents. This held true for years after the death of Marx and Engels. United States in 1848 As concerns the United States in 1848, despite its independence, with its population of 26 millions virtually restricted to the Eastern seaboard, it was economically little more than a colony of European capitalism, in the first instance England – a colony more advanced than the others, but a colony nonetheless. The young American bourgeoisie had hardly begun to exploit the virgin continent. The native capitalists remained weak not alone in relation to the European ruling classes but also in relation to the Southern slaveholders. So feeble, indeed, that they were content to share state power with the slavocracy and permit the latter to wield it.

The modern industrial proletariat here was still to emerge. Placed in their historical setting, the omission of Russia and the United States from the Manifesto does not seem so one-sided and flagrant as appears at first sight. Major corrections with regard to both Russia and the United States were made by Marx and Engels themselves later on. If they refrained from making any changes in the Manifesto, it was because of their conscientious approach, in theory and practice, to all historical facts, including their own epoch-making work. This does not mean that no important amendments or rectifications need be introduced today into the text of the Manifesto. Elsewhere in this issue the reader will find Leon Trotsky’s analysis of the basic propositions in this revolutionary document in the light of ninety years that elapsed since its publication. It will be noted that Trotsky deals with everything that has become outdated in the Manifesto as well as with everything important that requires changes or amplification. The young authors of the Manifesto placed their confidence in only one force in society: the proletariat.

If they expected social progress to manifest itself first in the advanced countries through revolutionary upheavals, it was because other countries had not yet given birth to large-scale industry and therewith to the modern proletariat, the motor force of progress in our society. A century ago the main channel of social revolution flowed through Western Europe. Both Marx and Engels expected the first-born proletarians there to fulfill their historic mission and for those who came later to follow suit. However it turned out that the proletariat of imperialist France and Britain was successfully corrupted over the years by the ruling class, or more correctly, the official French and British labor leaders misled or betrayed their class. Therewith the historical development of the revolution by-passed its original channel and dug new passageways for itself. Hopeful as were the authors of the Manifesto that history would take the most direct route, they were by no means blind to other possible variants, i.e., indirect and more complex forms. To maintain the contrary is to repeat the ignorant Stalinist canard to the effect that the founders of scientific socialism knew nothing about uneven and combined development, one of the outstanding features of the dialectic of social evolution.

From the standpoint of theory it is absurd to maintain that Marx and Engels never expected or even denied that, under altered conditions, backward countries could suddenly leap to the fore and surge ahead of those more advanced. Such a contention appears even more absurd in the light of known facts. Germany in 1848 Marx and Engels attached the greatest importance to developments in Germany. But it is generally forgotten that the authors of the Manifesto were themselves natives of one of the most impoverished and backward Western European countries. The Germany they knew lagged far behind both England and France, politically as well as economically. Several decades were to pass after 1848 before Germany could accomplish such a task of the bourgeois democratic revolution as unifying the country itself. Nevertheless it was precisely from the soil of this backward country that the liberating ideas of Marxism emanated. It was there that they most firmly took root and gained their first mass following. Moreover, it was through the example and influence of the pioneer German Marxist movement that the ideas of the Manifesto became the guide for millions throughout the world and led to the formation of the Second International. The world had never before seen an internationalist mass movement of such size, dynamism and power.

Marx died before the Second International came into being. But his co-thinker, friend and comrade-in-arms lived to see with his own eyes the first great practical test and confirmation of Marxism represented by this unparalleled spread of its ideas. “The old local and national self-sufficiency and isolation are replaced by a system of universal intercourse, of all-round interdependence of the nations. We see this in intellectual production no less than in material. The intellectual products of each nation are now the common property of all.” These prophetic words of the Manifesto sum up the triumph of Marxism over all other schools of thought within the world working class not only in the lifetime of its authors but in our own time. In the unchallenged supremacy of Marxism among the vanguard of Western European workers, represented by the parties of the Second International, Engels saw the greatest pledge of the coming world victory of socialism. He died unaware that the axis of Marxist thought was to shift within a few decades sharply to the East. But it is clear that he had some forebodings about the literary executors of Marxism, Karl Kautsky and Edward Bernstein.

What these revisionists and renegades from Marxism and their allies succeeded in perpetrating inside the Western European labor movement is part of the history of our own day. An even more important part of that history is what was accomplished in the East, in Russia, by those disciples who remained true to the teachings and heritage of the Manifesto. The Role of “Backwardness” It was in Russia that the great historic dispute over the role of “backwardness” in modern social struggles took place. All the “original thinkers” there cited Russia’s economic backwardness as an insuperable barrier to the spread of the ideas in the Manifesto and to their applicability in Russia. But the orthodox Russian Marxists, first Plekhanov and his disciples, the pioneers of Russian Marxism, and later the Bolsheviks, under Lenin and Trotsky, insisted that Russia’s economic backwardness was only a relative factor, which could not be appraised correctly within an isolated national framework. Russia’s economic backwardness had to be viewed in the context of the “system of universal intercourse, of all-round interdependence of the nations,” emphasized by the Manifesto.

Despite her undeniable economic backwardness Russia had become materially and ideologically linked with the rest of the world as an integral segment of the capitalist system. Russia’s social problems could be solved only through the mechanism of classes. There was no solution to the unpostponable historical tasks facing Russia except under the leadership of the revolutionary proletariat. The way out for Russia was the same as that for the most advanced countries – along the road charted in the Manifesto. These orthodox Russian Marxists were vindicated by history. World War I proved that Russia was a link in the imperialist chain. It is easy today after the victory to single out Russia as especially suited for revolution and its workers ready to embrace Marxism. In reality, before the Twentieth Century, Russia had witnessed no mass revolutionary struggles, had no traditions of free political activity, let alone any influential socialist movements. Her working class was meagerly unionized, comprising only a small fraction of the population. Both Marxism and trade unionism had to be imported from Western Europe. The pioneers of Marxism and later the leaders of Bolshevism had to create new traditions, new institutions and introduce new methods of action under extremely difficult circumstances.

Russia proved to be the weakest link of imperialism because her working class movement, conquered and led by Bolshevism, proved capable of rising to the level of its historic tasks. Events in 1917 took the course they did in Russia because her working class rose to political heights unattained before by any other. It rejected the misleadership of anti-Marxists and revisionists and built in time the proletarian party, decisive instrument of the proletarian revolution. A Practical Vindication The conquest of power by the Russian workers and peasants in October 1917, thanks to the correct policies pursued by the Bolshevik Party, constituted the greatest practical vindication of the Manifesto. It resulted in the political and social transformation of one-sixth of the earth’s surface; it inspired similar movements in other countries and on other continents; and moulded the entire course of world history since its occurrence. This first victory of a section of the world working class over the capitalist regime unquestionably has been the outstanding event of the Twentieth Century. It provides the starting point for the perspectives, strategy and even tactics of the world proletariat.

The world party – the Third International – that arose as a direct consequence of the Russian Revolution, rallied behind it a mass following far surpassing in all respects the original mass mobilization under the banner of the Second International. Lenin died confident of the quick victory of the world revolution. Leon Trotsky lived to see this victory delayed for decades by the degeneration of Lenin’s world party. The Second International fell primarily because of the betrayal of the leadership of its largest and strongest party, the German Social Democracy. The same fate, under different conditions, befell the Third International first because of the ideological bankruptcy and then the open treachery of its key party’s leadership, the Stalinized Russian party. As a consequence of the debacle of the Third International, the axis of Marxism once more shifted sharply – Eastward to the vast colonial regions of Asia (China, India, Indio-China, etc.), and simultaneously back again to the West. The embodiment of this crucial shift is the world Trotskyist movement, the Fourth International, founded a decade ago. The previous shift of the axis of Marxism was confined primarily to the European continent.

This new westward swing of the historical pendulum in the realm of Marxist thought and action encompassed not alone Western Europe but also the Western Hemisphere, in particular, the Latin American countries and the United States itself. American capitalism has undergone the freest and greatest expansion, outstripping by far all the Western European countries put together. The power wielded in her heyday by Britain, the first-born of capitalism, pales by comparison with the might and resources of American imperialism. Yet of all the great countries in the world the United States has been the “least contaminated” with Marxism. This condition of political backwardness has been advanced by all schools of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois thought as decisive proof that the ideas of the Communist Manifesto are inapplicable to capitalist America. This was the keynote sounded by the leading periodicals of the American bourgeoisie on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the Manifesto. They all proclaimed the “irrevocable triumph” of Free Enterprise, in the person of GM, US Steel, Ford and other monopolies, over Marx and Engels.

Thus the old dispute between Marxists and anti-Marxists over the issue of “backwardness” in modern social struggles reappears in a new form and under new conditions. The enemies of Marxism in the most highly developed capitalist country cannot and do not lean upon the factor of economic backwardness as did the Russian anti-Marxists and as do their successors in the colonies today. They bring forward the political backwardness of American labor as the decisive factor which excludes the spread of Marxist ideas and which allegedly constitutes an insuperable obstacle to the victory of socialism. A Relative Factor This political backwardness is no less relative a factor than was Germany’s economic and political backwardness in the days of the Communist Manifesto and Russia’s economic backwardness in pre-revolutionary days. It is the transitory product of past conditions, which less and less correspond to the new world and domestic situation. Just as in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries the American people eliminated pre-capitalist forms and forces, so today they are undermining the established capitalist relations. In climbing from its colonial status in 1848 to its present predominant world position, the US has developed in complete accordance with the basic propositions set down in the Manifesto.

The last hundred years have witnessed the steady concentration of wealth in capitalist hands and the uninterrupted growth of the power of the monopolies. While the industrial proletariat has experienced a tremendous growth, the intermediate elements have been squeezed out and pauperized. In recent years the conflict between capitalists and workers has grown sharper, amid the intensification of political reaction. Finally, this country continues to be convulsed by recurring economic crises, each more catastrophic than the one before. Why then has the political consciousness of the American workers failed to keep step with this maturing of the social crisis of American capitalism? The first reason is to be found in the historical conditions of American capitalist development. The unparalleled field of operation at its disposal placed US capitalism in an exceptionally favorable position in competition with its rivals abroad and in relation to its workers at home. Economically, it was free from the outset to exploit a virgin continent. By virtue of its resources, geographic position and World War I, it was able to march toward the subjugation of the entire Western Hemisphere, thus rising to a position where it now seeks to dominate and exploit the entire world.

Politically, it successfully completed the tasks of the bourgeois revolution first through its victorious struggle for independence and next through the destruction of the slave system in Civil War. All this placed American capitalism in the most privileged position and served to hinder not only the political growth but even the industrial organization of the working class. Let us recall that the latter task was not accomplished until the birth of the CIO a little more than a decade ago. For more than three-quarters of a century the bourgeoisie has dominated the political arena by means of its two-party system. This key monopoly was never seriously challenged in the past, not for lack of opposition but because of the class character of this opposition. The sporadic third party movements have been overwhelmingly agrarian and petty bourgeois in composition, in program, in leadership. The working class, instead of forging to the fore, served as a tail to the kite of these rump movements of the past, or fell back into subservience to the two major capitalist parties. Marxism and American Labor Against this background, socialist ideas sprouted but did not widely spread. The pioneer Social Democratic movement remained for the most part restricted to the foreign-born. The same thing was true of the pioneer Communist movement.

The Stalinist degeneration of the official Communist Party served only to discredit the ideas of Marxism and its socialist goal. But the conditions that produced and fed this political backwardness either no longer exist or are turning into their opposite. The force of inertia coupled with the abject cowardice and treachery of the official leadership now constitute the main stumbling blocks to the swift political growth of the American proletariat. In the last 30 years the American working class has gone through two world wars and a terrible depression. It emerged from World War II with mighty union organizations extending from coast to coast in all the basic industries. It has engaged in titanic battles with the monopolists. It has less and less confidence in the stability or eternity of the existing economic system. It is under tremendous pressures to narrow the yawning gap between its advanced economic position and its backward political organization and consciousness. If American capitalism could provide decent living standards and maintain an appreciable measure of democracy, it could conceivably prolong the political backwardness of American labor, and indefinitely postpone the struggle for state power. But the drive of American capitalism is in just the opposite direction. They indicated this by their price-gouging and Taft-Hartley Law at the peak of the postwar boom.

The convulsions of the oncoming depression will serve only to reinforce the capitalist offensive against labor’s rights and living standards. Thus while the conditions for the political immaturity of American workers are disappearing one by one, in their place are arising conditions which act to precipitate the political crisis of American labor. Toward the close of the Nineteenth Century the economically backward German workers embraced Marxist doctrines. At the beginning of the Twentieth Century the even more economically and culturally backward Russian workers were powerfully attracted to Marxism. Why should the highly cultured and technically competent workers here find them any less irresistible? There is every reason to believe that they will eagerly seize upon them. If anything is peculiar to the American workers it is their esteem for fine tools. These they know and value. They will need political topis in the sharpening class struggle. Big Business will not relent until it has completely housebroken the labor movement and shackled the unions to its state machine. On the other hand, the workers have no prospect of defending themselves and preserving the independent existence of their unions separate and apart from the prospect of irreconcilable political struggle against Big Business.

They will find the political tools they need to replace and reconstruct the existing system in the treasure chest of Marxism and the program of the revolutionary party. The mass production workers showed how quickly they could adopt the most advanced methods and forms of industrial union organization. In the next stages of the class struggle, these same workers will embrace the most modern methods and forms of political action and will also very likely add a few innovations of their own. Cheap Pessimism Non-Marxists and anti-Marxists invariably fasten their gaze only on one side of historical development, and that the darkest side. They therefore find no lack of arguments and pretexts for cheap pessimistic conclusions. But those who try to see things in their true light and proper context can remain confident of the future as were the authors of the Manifesto, and after them, Lenin and Trotsky. Serious revolutionists do not work for a day, a year or even for a few decades. A hundred years seems a long time measured by the life-span of an individual. But where world-transforming processes are concerned, it is no more than a brief moment. The ascending bourgeoisie required some four centuries to conquer power in the principal civilized centers and consolidate their world rule.

The process of the proletariat’s rise to power will take considerably less time. As a matter of fact, it began in Russia three decades ago when the first detachment of labor dislodged the old rulers. It is possible to dwell upon the set-backs and defeats suffered by the Western European workers. But far more decisive is the collapse of European capitalism on the one hand, and the revolutionary significance of the repeated offensives of the European workers against the ruling powers, on the other hand. It is possible to become blinded by the abominations of Stalinism, and to single out its undeniable powers of corruption and destruction. But far more decisive is the instability of Stalinist regime and the blind alley in which it has arrived. It is possible to tremble before the Moloch of American imperialism and to forget that there exists a mightier power on this continent – the power of the organized 16 million workers. Alongside this young giant of American labor there stand millions of oppressed Negroes, the natural allies of the revolutionary workers, who are destined to play a major role in the titanic events that lie ahead. Beside the possessors of the atom bomb there live and toil the producers of atomic explosives.

Once they are aroused and enlightened, their offensive will confound the skeptics and amaze the world. Our Party’s Task It is possible to see the small size and modest influence of the Socialist Worker’s Party and scoff at its aspiration to lead the American workers to the establishment of a Worker’s and Farmer’s Government. But the stark reality of our day is that, as the irrepressible conflict widens and deepens, the American workers will be more and more compelled to adopt the ideas of the Manifesto and to follow the course charted by the Russian workers. Our party’s task is to help them find that road as quickly as possible in order to save civilization from destruction. Neither the founders of Marxism nor the leaders of Bolshevism entertained doubts about the socialist future of the American labor movement. Back in 1890 Frederick Engels wrote the following concerning the revolutionary potential of American workers: “If the Americans once begin, with all their energy and virulence, we in Europe shall look like children.” Since then the march of events has made one thing clear: The struggle for socialism must be fought to a finish and consummated in the US.

The existing world situation has placed the American workers in a position where they play a decisive role in determining the future of mankind. In the spirit of the Communist Manifesto, Leon Trotsky foresaw this as far back as 1925 when at the height of the fabulous boom of the Twenties, he wrote: In spite of all its huge power, American capitalism is not a self-contained factor but a part of world economy. Furthermore, the more powerful the industry of the United States becomes, the more intimate and profound becomes its dependence on the world market. Driving the European countries farther and farther down their blind alley, American capitalism is laying the foundation for wars and revolutionary upheavals, which in their frightful rebound will not fail to strike the economic system of the United States also. Such is the prospect for America ... But the inevitable hour will strike for American capitalism also: The American oil and steel magnates, trust and export leaders, the multi-millionaires of New York, Chicago and San Francisco, are performing – though unconsciously – their predestined revolutionary function. And the American proletariat will ultimately discharge theirs.

Communist Manifesto - Analysis | Milestone Documents - Milestone Documents Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Communist Manifesto (1848) Commentary by Martin Berger, Youngstown State University (emeritus) College Instructors: Browse Read about how Marx and Engels brought out a Manifesto that would change the course of history in many countries. - The Hindu February 25, 2016 13:25 IST more-in Young World Marx and Engels brought out a Manifesto that would change the course of history in many countries. The Communist Manifesto pamphlet was published on February 26, 1848 by two young socialists, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marx was a philosopher, economist, sociologist and journalist who spent much of his life in London. Engels was a German philosopher, social scientist, journalist and a businessman and just before he joined Marx, he was working in Manchester, U.K., and had published The Condition of the Working Class in England. The Manifesto advocated the abolition of all private property and a system in which workers own all means of production, land, factories and machinery.

It was written to tackle the class struggle and the problems of capitalism (one person owning too much wealth). According to them, “The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles” — meaning the problems in society were mainly because of money. The manifesto is divided into a preamble with four main sections and a conclusion. In the spring of 1847, Marx and Engels joined the “League of the Just”. Engels was entrusted with writing about “profession of faith”, but it was later believed to be inappropriate for an open, non-confrontational organisation. But when Engels found out about the manifesto, which was already written, he found it inadequate and criticised it. In fact, he went a step ahead and asked the group to entrust him with drafting a new one which went on to become the Principles of Communism. On November 23, 1847, before the Communist League’s Second Congress, Engels wrote to Marx asking him to do away with the catechism format in the manifesto. Marx and Engels met in Belgium, and a few days later, attended the Congress too.

Over the next 10 days, there were heated debates and arguments and Marx dominated the entire programme thereby winning majority and drafting the new manifesto with Engels. Dilly-dallying But on returning to Brussels, Marx never really got down to writing it. Instead, he got busy with delivering lectures and writing articles. He travelled places to establish branches of the Democratic Association. When even after two months the association had not heard from Marx, the Central Committee of the Communist League sent him an ultimatum demanding that he submit the completed manuscript by February 1, 1848. This was enough to urge him to work harder and he rushed to finish it on time. The manifesto was written and though Engels is credited as co-writer, the final draft was written only by Marx. The concluding statement read: “Working Men of All Countries, Unite.” This became the rallying cry of the Communist party. Communist Manifesto (Chapter 3) Chapter III. Socialist and Communist Literature 1. Reactionary Socialism A. Feudal Socialism Owing to their historical position, it became the vocation of the aristocracies of France and England to write pamphlets against modern bourgeois society.

In the French Revolution of July 1830, and in the English reform agitation [A] , these aristocracies again succumbed to the hateful upstart. Thenceforth, a serious political struggle was altogether out of the question. A literary battle alone remained possible. But even in the domain of literature the old cries of the restoration period had become impossible. (1) In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy was obliged to lose sight, apparently, of its own interests, and to formulate their indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus, the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new masters and whispering in his ears sinister prophesies of coming catastrophe. In this way arose feudal Socialism: half lamentation, half lampoon; half an echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart’s core; but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history. The aristocracy, in order to rally the people to them, waved the proletarian alms-bag in front for a banner.

But the people, so often as it joined them, saw on their hindquarters the old feudal coats of arms, and deserted with loud and irreverent laughter. One section of the French Legitimists and “ Young England ” exhibited this spectacle. In pointing out that their mode of exploitation was different to that of the bourgeoisie, the feudalists forget that they exploited under circumstances and conditions that were quite different and that are now antiquated. In showing that, under their rule, the modern proletariat never existed, they forget that the modern bourgeoisie is the necessary offspring of their own form of society. For the rest, so little do they conceal the reactionary character of their criticism that their chief accusation against the bourgeois amounts to this, that under the bourgeois régime a class is being developed which is destined to cut up root and branch the old order of society. What they upbraid the bourgeoisie with is not so much that it creates a proletariat as that it creates a revolutionary proletariat.

In political practice, therefore, they join in all coercive measures against the working class; and in ordinary life, despite their high-falutin phrases, they stoop to pick up the golden apples dropped from the tree of industry, and to barter truth, love, and honour, for traffic in wool, beetroot-sugar, and potato spirits. (2) As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord, so has Clerical Socialism with Feudal Socialism. Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against private property, against marriage, against the State? Has it not preached in the place of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church? Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat. B. Petty-Bourgeois Socialism The feudal aristocracy was not the only class that was ruined by the bourgeoisie, not the only class whose conditions of existence pined and perished in the atmosphere of modern bourgeois society. The medieval burgesses and the small peasant proprietors were the precursors of the modern bourgeoisie.

In those countries which are but little developed, industrially and commercially, these two classes still vegetate side by side with the rising bourgeoisie. In countries where modern civilisation has become fully developed, a new class of petty bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie, and ever renewing itself as a supplementary part of bourgeois society. The individual members of this class, however, are being constantly hurled down into the proletariat by the action of competition, and, as modern industry develops, they even see the moment approaching when they will completely disappear as an independent section of modern society, to be replaced in manufactures, agriculture and commerce, by overlookers, bailiffs and shopmen. In countries like France, where the peasants constitute far more than half of the population, it was natural that writers who sided with the proletariat against the bourgeoisie should use, in their criticism of the bourgeois régime, the standard of the peasant and petty bourgeois, and from the standpoint of these intermediate classes, should take up the cudgels for the working class. Thus arose petty-bourgeois Socialism. Sismondi was the head of this school, not only in France but also in England.

This school of Socialism dissected with great acuteness the contradictions in the conditions of modern production. It laid bare the hypocritical apologies of economists. It proved, incontrovertibly, the disastrous effects of machinery and division of labour; the concentration of capital and land in a few hands; overproduction and crises; it pointed out the inevitable ruin of the petty bourgeois and peasant, the misery of the proletariat, the anarchy in production, the crying inequalities in the distribution of wealth, the industrial war of extermination between nations, the dissolution of old moral bonds, of the old family relations, of the old nationalities. In its positive aims, however, this form of Socialism aspires either to restoring the old means of production and of exchange, and with them the old property relations, and the old society, or to cramping the modern means of production and of exchange within the framework of the old property relations that have been, and were bound to be, exploded by those means. In either case, it is both reactionary and Utopian. Its last words are: corporate guilds for manufacture; patriarchal relations in agriculture.

Ultimately, when stubborn historical facts had dispersed all intoxicating effects of self-deception, this form of Socialism ended in a miserable fit of the blues. C. German or “True” Socialism The Socialist and Communist literature of France, a literature that originated under the pressure of a bourgeoisie in power, and that was the expressions of the struggle against this power, was introduced into Germany at a time when the bourgeoisie, in that country, had just begun its contest with feudal absolutism. German philosophers, would-be philosophers, and beaux esprits (men of letters), eagerly seized on this literature, only forgetting, that when these writings immigrated from France into Germany, French social conditions had not immigrated along with them. In contact with German social conditions, this French literature lost all its immediate practical significance and assumed a purely literary aspect. Thus, to the German philosophers of the Eighteenth Century, the demands of the first French Revolution were nothing more than the demands of “Practical Reason” in general, and the utterance of the will of the revolutionary French bourgeoisie signified, in their eyes, the laws of pure Will, of Will as it was bound to be, of true human Will generally.

The work of the German literati consisted solely in bringing the new French ideas into harmony with their ancient philosophical conscience, or rather, in annexing the French ideas without deserting their own philosophic point of view. This annexation took place in the same way in which a foreign language is appropriated, namely, by translation. It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints over the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been written. The German literati reversed this process with the profane French literature. They wrote their philosophical nonsense beneath the French original. For instance, beneath the French criticism of the economic functions of money, they wrote “Alienation of Humanity”, and beneath the French criticism of the bourgeois state they wrote “Dethronement of the Category of the General”, and so forth. The introduction of these philosophical phrases at the back of the French historical criticisms, they dubbed “Philosophy of Action”, “True Socialism”, “German Science of Socialism”, “Philosophical Foundation of Socialism”, and so on. The French Socialist and Communist literature was thus completely emasculated.

And, since it ceased in the hands of the German to express the struggle of one class with the other, he felt conscious of having overcome “French one-sidedness” and of representing, not true requirements, but the requirements of Truth; not the interests of the proletariat, but the interests of Human Nature, of Man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy. This German socialism, which took its schoolboy task so seriously and solemnly, and extolled its poor stock-in-trade in such a mountebank fashion, meanwhile gradually lost its pedantic innocence. The fight of the Germans, and especially of the Prussian bourgeoisie, against feudal aristocracy and absolute monarchy, in other words, the liberal movement, became more earnest. By this, the long-wished for opportunity was offered to “True” Socialism of confronting the political movement with the Socialist demands, of hurling the traditional anathemas against liberalism, against representative government, against bourgeois competition, bourgeois freedom of the press, bourgeois legislation, bourgeois liberty and equality, and of preaching to the masses that they had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by this bourgeois movement.

German Socialism forgot, in the nick of time, that the French criticism, whose silly echo it was, presupposed the existence of modern bourgeois society, with its corresponding economic conditions of existence, and the political constitution adapted thereto, the very things those attainment was the object of the pending struggle in Germany. To the absolute governments, with their following of parsons, professors, country squires, and officials, it served as a welcome scarecrow against the threatening bourgeoisie. It was a sweet finish, after the bitter pills of flogging and bullets, with which these same governments, just at that time, dosed the German working-class risings. While this “True” Socialism thus served the government as a weapon for fighting the German bourgeoisie, it, at the same time, directly represented a reactionary interest, the interest of German Philistines. In Germany, the petty-bourgeois class, a relic of the sixteenth century, and since then constantly cropping up again under the various forms, is the real social basis of the existing state of things. To preserve this class is to preserve the existing state of things in Germany.

The industrial and political supremacy of the bourgeoisie threatens it with certain destruction — on the one hand, from the concentration of capital; on the other, from the rise of a revolutionary proletariat. “True” Socialism appeared to kill these two birds with one stone. It spread like an epidemic. The robe of speculative cobwebs, embroidered with flowers of rhetoric, steeped in the dew of sickly sentiment, this transcendental robe in which the German Socialists wrapped their sorry “eternal truths”, all skin and bone, served to wonderfully increase the sale of their goods amongst such a public. And on its part German Socialism recognised, more and more, its own calling as the bombastic representative of the petty-bourgeois Philistine. It proclaimed the German nation to be the model nation, and the German petty Philistine to be the typical man. To every villainous meanness of this model man, it gave a hidden, higher, Socialistic interpretation, the exact contrary of its real character. It went to the extreme length of directly opposing the “brutally destructive” tendency of Communism, and of proclaiming its supreme and impartial contempt of all class struggles.

With very few exceptions, all the so-called Socialist and Communist publications that now (1847) circulate in Germany belong to the domain of this foul and enervating literature. (3) 2. Conservative or Bourgeois Socialism A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society. To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind. This form of socialism has, moreover, been worked out into complete systems. We may cite Proudhon’s Philosophie de la Misère as an example of this form. The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems.

In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie. A second, and more practical, but less systematic, form of this Socialism sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working class by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change in the material conditions of existence, in economical relations, could be of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence, this form of Socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be affected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations between capital and labour, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work, of bourgeois government. Bourgeois Socialism attains adequate expression when, and only when, it becomes a mere figure of speech. Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the benefit of the working class.

Prison Reform: for the benefit of the working class. This is the last word and the only seriously meant word of bourgeois socialism. It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois — for the benefit of the working class. 3. Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism We do not here refer to that literature which, in every great modern revolution, has always given voice to the demands of the proletariat, such as the writings of Babeuf and others. The first direct attempts of the proletariat to attain its own ends, made in times of universal excitement, when feudal society was being overthrown, necessarily failed, owing to the then undeveloped state of the proletariat, as well as to the absence of the economic conditions for its emancipation, conditions that had yet to be produced, and could be produced by the impending bourgeois epoch alone. The revolutionary literature that accompanied these first movements of the proletariat had necessarily a reactionary character. It inculcated universal asceticism and social levelling in its crudest form.

The Socialist and Communist systems, properly so called, those of Saint-Simon , Fourier , Owen , and others, spring into existence in the early undeveloped period, described above, of the struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie (see Section 1. Bourgeois and Proletarians ). The founders of these systems see, indeed, the class antagonisms, as well as the action of the decomposing elements in the prevailing form of society. But the proletariat, as yet in its infancy, offers to them the spectacle of a class without any historical initiative or any independent political movement. Since the development of class antagonism keeps even pace with the development of industry, the economic situation, as they find it, does not as yet offer to them the material conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat. They therefore search after a new social science, after new social laws, that are to create these conditions. Historical action is to yield to their personal inventive action; historically created conditions of emancipation to fantastic ones; and the gradual, spontaneous class organisation of the proletariat to an organisation of society especially contrived by these inventors. Future history resolves itself, in their eyes, into the propaganda and the practical carrying out of their social plans.

In the formation of their plans, they are conscious of caring chiefly for the interests of the working class, as being the most suffering class. Only from the point of view of being the most suffering class does the proletariat exist for them. The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own surroundings, causes Socialists of this kind to consider themselves far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favoured. Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without the distinction of class; nay, by preference, to the ruling class. For how can people, when once they understand their system, fail to see in it the best possible plan of the best possible state of society? Hence, they reject all political, and especially all revolutionary action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the new social Gospel. Such fantastic pictures of future society, painted at a time when the proletariat is still in a very undeveloped state and has but a fantastic conception of its own position, correspond with the first instinctive yearnings of that class for a general reconstruction of society.

But these Socialist and Communist publications contain also a critical element. They attack every principle of existing society. Hence, they are full of the most valuable materials for the enlightenment of the working class. The practical measures proposed in them — such as the abolition of the distinction between town and country, of the family, of the carrying on of industries for the account of private individuals, and of the wage system, the proclamation of social harmony, the conversion of the function of the state into a more superintendence of production — all these proposals point solely to the disappearance of class antagonisms which were, at that time, only just cropping up, and which, in these publications, are recognised in their earliest indistinct and undefined forms only. These proposals, therefore, are of a purely Utopian character. The significance of Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism bears an inverse relation to historical development. In proportion as the modern class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic standing apart from the contest, these fantastic attacks on it, lose all practical value and all theoretical justification. Therefore, although the originators of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects.

They hold fast by the original views of their masters, in opposition to the progressive historical development of the proletariat. They, therefore, endeavour, and that consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They still dream of experimental realisation of their social Utopias, of founding isolated “phalansteres”, of establishing “Home Colonies”, or setting up a “Little Icaria” (4) — duodecimo editions of the New Jerusalem — and to realise all these castles in the air, they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the bourgeois. By degrees, they sink into the category of the reactionary [or] conservative Socialists depicted above, differing from these only by more systematic pedantry, and by their fanatical and superstitious belief in the miraculous effects of their social science. They, therefore, violently oppose all political action on the part of the working class; such action, according to them, can only result from blind unbelief in the new Gospel. The Owenites in England, and the Fourierists in France, respectively, oppose the Chartists and the Réformistes.

Chapter 4: Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties (1) Not the English Restoration (1660-1689), but the French Restoration (1814-1830). [Note by Engels to the English edition of 1888.] (2) This applies chiefly to Germany, where the landed aristocracy and squirearchy have large portions of their estates cultivated for their own account by stewards, and are, moreover, extensive beetroot-sugar manufacturers and distillers of potato spirits. The wealthier British aristocracy are, as yet, rather above that; but they, too, know how to make up for declining rents by lending their names to floaters or more or less shady joint-stock companies. [Note by Engels to the English edition of 1888.] (3) The revolutionary storm of 1848 swept away this whole shabby tendency and cured its protagonists of the desire to dabble in socialism. The chief representative and classical type of this tendency is Mr Karl Gruen.

[Note by Engels to the German edition of 1890.] (4) Phalanstéres were Socialist colonies on the plan of Charles Fourier; Icaria was the name given by Cabet to his Utopia and, later on, to his American Communist colony. [Note by Engels to the English edition of 1888.] “Home Colonies” were what Owen called his Communist model societies. Phalanstéres was the name of the public palaces planned by Fourier. Icaria was the name given to the Utopian land of fancy, whose Communist institutions Cabet portrayed. [Note by Engels to the German edition of 1890.] [A] A reference to the movement for a reform of the electoral law which, under the pressure of the working class, was passed by the British House of Commons in 1831 and finally endorsed by the House of Lords in June, 1832. The reform was directed against monopoly rule of the landed and finance aristocracy and opened the way to Parliament for the representatives of the industrial bourgeoisie. Neither workers nor the petty-bourgeois were allowed electoral rights, despite assurances they would.

Question: The younger co-writer of the 1848 Communist Manifesto?
Answer: Friedrich Engels